The iTech Blog

Everything Your IBM Business Partner Should Be Doing for You

Posted on February 26, 2020

Steve Pitcher, iTech Solutions

System Down with No Coverage

It was 9 PM on a Sunday night about a year ago when I received a call on my cell phone from a local IBM i customer. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call him…Gary. I reached out to Gary a couple of times before to introduce myself but never had any return communication until then. Turns out, Gary had a down system. His staff did an IPL and the system just wouldn’t come back online. He did what we all would do and called IBM support. Unfortunately, they told him that he had no software maintenance contract. He then called his then-partner. No answer.

I immediately sent a GoToMeeting to the customer and texted iTech Solutions’ President Pete Massiello to have him on alert that I may need some backup. Pete, being Pete, was on the GoToMeeting faster than the customer.

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Costs of IBM i Storage Beyond the CEC: Expansion Drawers vs. V5030E SAN

Posted on February 25, 2020

Richie Palma, Tech Solutions Consultant

IBM i Storage by the Numbers: Internal vs External SSD

I wrote an article on LinkedIn called “Shocking… IBM i Cost of Storage beyond the CEC: EXP-24S or V3700 SAN?” back in 2016 that sparked many conversations on what place external storage has in the IBM i hardware stack. As a result of the popularity of my previous article, big innovation in the storage market, changes in storage costs, and a much more open IBM i infrastructure stack, it seemed like a really good time to go through the exercise again.

I don’t think it’s my place to sell you on whether internal or external storage is better. Honestly, I believe there is a strong case to be made for both, depending on the customer situation. With that being said I think it’s important I share my experience and knowledge, so you have what you need to make an informed decision for the businesses you serve.

For IBM i clients, typically there are a few reasons why they start to ponder a move to external storage:

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B2B Podcasts – Do You Know What You’re Missing?

Posted on November 20, 2019

Heather Dinho, iTech Solutions

There’s no doubt that podcasts have become the new media Goliath. Podcasting is seeing rapid growth year over year. According to Podcast Insights_1,51% of the US Population (approximately 144 million people) have listened to a podcast, with this number being up from 44% in 2018. Hundreds of new podcasts are being developed daily with no end to this growth trend in sight.

Podcasting is a go-to source for entertainment, education, and news; mostly produced on for the traditional B2C consumer. However, there’s a growing trend of educational entertainment that is matching the listener’s passions and professions while creating a unique B2B listener experience. Listeners can now get fresh content spoken directly from industry colleagues and thought leaders on topics that are relevant to their day to day pains and gains. These B2B podcasts impart relatable experience while you, the listener, get to learn about your industry trends, new product releases, and tips and tricks, all while feeling some camaraderie in the dialog of these people you already know or know of.

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Posted in: Blog
Tagged with: b2b podcast, IBM i, ibm i podcast, ipower hour

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POWER9 – Which is Better: Internal or External Storage?

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Most IBM i customers have an ERP package on their IBM Power server that runs their business. Typically, a small or mid-sized company can comfortably operate with one Power9 core activation, that provides a CPW of 13,125. The IBM Power9 model S914 has two processor options, a 4-core, and a 6-core. Which one do you get if you only need 1 core activation? The 4-core server is physically the same as the 6-core server, except for the processor and the other differences shown in the table below.

Feature	4-core	6-core
Maximum Cores	4	6
Maximum Memory	64GB	1TB
Maximum Internal Disk Drives	10 (283GB HDD or 387GB SSD)	672, many HDD & SSD sizes
BUS Expansion	None	1 drawer – 6 adapter slots
Software Tier Group	P05	P10

Let’s discuss each of these differences in more detail:

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What to Know About IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1

Posted on October 21, 2019

By Laurie LeBlanc

IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1 were announced during IBM Tech U and will be generally available on November 16, 2019. This refresh includes many enhancements to improve further the reliability, availability, and security of your IBM i environment. Some of the major enhancements are focused on DB2 Mirror for IBM i, enhancements to help developers modernize, increased security, and support for new hardware.

I’m going to highlight some of the features that improve the security and administration of your system. There are also many enhancements for RDi that will improve developer productivity and allow you to modernize with additional support for Open Source languages and tools. I don’t plan to get into the details of those enhancements in this article, but I will touch on them. You can get more details about all of the enhancements here.

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It’s Domino Renewal Time

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Steve Pitcher

We have some great news! As of just recently, iTech Solutions has become an HCL Business Partner.

What does that mean for you?

For starters, iTech can now review your existing IBM maintenance agreements for the following products:

Notes
Domino
Connections
Sametime
And more!

Why should we review your maintenance agreements before renewal?

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Five Reasons IBM i Shops Are Considering VTL Solutions

Posted on September 24, 2019

By Laurie LeBlanc

It’s plain and simple. You must execute backups daily. No excuses! It’s not just about being able to recover in a disaster; you also need to be able to recover a file that is accidentally overwritten or deleted.

If you have high availability and you think you don’t need to back up every day, you really should reconsider your strategy. Replication ensures that your target and source data are in sync, but if you delete a record or several records you need, you can’t get them back with replication. Backups protect your business data, which is a valuable asset.

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iTech Solutions Helps May Trucking Company Drop CPU Capacity from 90% to 20% with a New POWER8 Machine

Posted on September 3, 2019

May Trucking, an iTech Solutions customer, was recently featured in an IBM Systems Magazine case study, Transporting to the Future.

Jim Utsler of IBM Systems Magazine teamed up with Becki Wagoner, May Trucking Company’s vice president of strategic innovation and technology, to tell the story of how they modernized their infrastructure by moving to a POWER8 system.

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Introducing VERIFi by iTech Solutions

Posted on August 26, 2019

It is my pleasure to introduce to you a new product from iTech Solutions. We first developed this for our Managed Services (MSP) customers, and after so many great comments we decided to make it available to everyone. While our MSP customers get this report daily, this report on our new offering will be sent our weekly.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an experienced IBM i System administrator give you a report each week on the status of your system?

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Hey, we just moved a bunch of Domino servers from Windows to IBM i!

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Steve Pitcher

Every now and then you get to help a customer via a cool solution.

Problem:

We have a customer who was running three Domino 9 servers (mail, applications and Traveler) on three separate physical Windows servers at various OS versions. One of these servers was drastically underpowered from both processing and network throughput perspectives. Furthermore, nightly maintenance jobs (compact, updall, fixup) were not completing due to the large size of the databases and the underpowered servers. The lack of processing and network speed made backing up those Domino servers a challenge over the network. Each night the Domino backups would take over eight hours.

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Posted in: Blog
Tagged with: Domino, Domino Backup, Domino Servers, IBM i, ibm i os, IBM Power Systems

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Protecting IBM i against ransomware (it’s easier than you think)

Posted on July 31, 2019

Steve Pitcher, iTech Solutions

We get asked this question all the time: “how can I protect IBM i against ransomware?”

Ransomware is a hot button topic. It should be. The average ransom that companies paid in Q1 2019 rose to $12,762 from $6,733 the previous quarter. In some instances, ransoms are in the six-figure range or higher for large organizations with a low tolerance for downtime.

So, how do you protect the data on your IBM i partitions from being held hostage?

The first step is to acknowledge that your IBM i may be vulnerable

For many years our community has touted the security features of IBM i. None of that changes, of course. It’s highly securable. The problem is most people think it comes secured by default. It does not.

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As the Disk Spins: IBM Disk Drive Announcement for Storwize V5000 and V7000 Storage Systems

Posted on July 30, 2019

On July 2, 2019, IBM announced that 15K RPM hard disk drives would no longer be available for new orders of its Storwize V5000 and V7000 storage systems, US announcement letter 119-048. Why did IBM make this announcement and what does it mean for IBM i customers?

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Posted in: Blog
Tagged with: external storage, IBM i, ibm storage, ibm storage solution, V5000, V7000

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Can your backup survive a hurricane?

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It’s that time of year again, hurricanes, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are back again. Which means you’re at risk, especially if you haven’t done a recovery test of your backups recently. What are you waiting for, a natural disaster?

Store Backups offsite

While it may be common sense that you need to keep a copy of your backups offsite for recoverability, we encounter many companies who are not religious about removing tapes from the drive. It’s imperative that you store your backups offsite in case of a disaster. It doesn’t matter if you use physical tapes or virtual tapes, you need to make sure there is a copy in a second location.

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A Recap of POWERUp 2019 from the iTech team

Posted on May 30, 2019

Pete Massiello

Well, it has been a hell of a week, which seemed to start even on the way to the airport with getting in a few last minute calls.

So, how was my week at COMMON’s premier event, POWERUp 2019?

Probably the hardest place is where to start. It seems like we have been here for a lifetime, and at the same time the days went by so quickly. Certainly, the highlight for me was seeing so many friends, customers, meeting new people, and spending time with the other iTech employees: Laurie, Rick, Richie, Steve, and Yvonne. We don’t all work in Danbury, so every chance to see them is a treat for me. There was much to do together, from booth setup, meetings, working the booth, common sessions we attended, speaking, and then social events. This conference, other conferences, our customer meetings, as well as meetings in Danbury allow us to bridge the distance of not working in the same office each day.

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The iTech Blog

Everything Your IBM Business Partner Should Be Doing for You

System Down with No Coverage

Costs of IBM i Storage Beyond the CEC: Expansion Drawers vs. V5030E SAN